Can Data Be Innovative?

March 20, 2012 • Blog, Thoughts • by
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Inherently, data is a collection of the past. It is a summation of events that have already happened. We use data to help predict the future but data is inherently about what has come before. Can data then, be innovative?

I began thinking about this question after reading a post from Fast Company Design entitled, To Innovate, You Have to Stop Being a Slave to Data. The article talked about how companies are more and more using customer data as they develop new products and since people are inherently averse to change you can’t actually create anything new. I believe it was Steve Jobs who was the mindset that you shouldn’t ask customers what they want when developing a new product but should create something that they don’t realize they want. I think that is a good idea to think about when innovating.

So how can data play a part in innovation? First, I think data helps organizations understand their current reality. They can see what is currently resonating with consumers and what is not. Second, data can help predict what tomorrow might look like, thus helping innovators know what might be around the next corner.

At the end of the day though, I think data cannot produce innovation. I think it can play a huge role in the process of innovation but it is not at the steering wheel creating the next great product, idea, or organization. It cannot be ignored but you must also understand that it is fundamentally a relic of past events which is not always a good indicator of the future.

Design Your Year

January 4, 2012 • Blog, Thoughts • by
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This time of year is always conducive to self-reflection. We tend to set goals for ourselves, evaluate the past year, and prepare for the year ahead. It is a time when we step back and take the 30,000 foot perspective of where we are, and where we were going.

This year I did something a bit different as I stepped back and looked at my life. Far more than in previous years, I feel in control of my time, productivity, and income. Given that freedom, I wanted to take advantage of it and really look at designing a year that I would love to live.

So what I did was look at my past and identify the things that gave me the greatest pleasure. I then created four “buckets” that captured the essence of things I enjoyed. For me, I found I most enjoyed activities that were either Beautiful, Intellectually Rigorous, Lucrative, or Entrepreneurial. No one activity would fall into all four buckets, but for me to really feel alive I want to be doing at least something in each of these four areas.

I then listed out the activities I would be embarking on over this upcoming year. This included expanding my consulting practice, joining a brand new consulting practice with some people I know I can learn a ton from, making a documentary, and more. I then put these into the column of a spreadsheet with four columns for the buckets, putting an X when an activity fell into that bucket.

This allowed me to see where my year was going to look like. It allowed me to see I might want to do something else that is creative and not join any other entrepreneurial ventures. It was a helpful way of designing my year.

What things are you doing to prepare to take advantage of 2012?

Distorting Nonprofits

December 20, 2011 • Blog, nonprofit, Thoughts • by
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The nonprofit world has a fundamental distortion; the people who pay for services hardly ever receive them. The person who pays for the homeless shelter, never uses it. The person who pays for a child to receive a meal in Africa will most likely never meet that child. There is one portion of the nonprofit world for which this fundamental distortion is not generally true, the arts world.

Those who pay to keep art museums open, symphonies playing, and theaters performing are generally those who visit them regularly. This gives these organization a fundamental advantage when it comes to funding (and why some think these organizations should not really be considered nonprofits).

The Stanford Social Innovation Review, a go-to resource for all in the sector, had an interesting article last week entitled Arts Funding Promotes Neighborhood Vibrancy. What I found most interesting though, was the idea of selling the general community benefits of arts organizations. The SSIR had originally reported that arts funding spurs economic development but the organization ArtsWave responded by saying, while that’s true we like to say that it increases neighborhood vibrancy.

Here’s the ArtsWave insight: people are ready enough to agree with the notion that the arts are good for the economy. But if you probe deeper, and ask what top three things we should do to improve the economy, no one answers “subsidize the arts.” So apparently the argument that the arts are an economic engine (true or false) is unpersuasive, which is what really matters.

Let me just pause here quickly and say that I think they are slightly incorrect. Everyone would probably agree with the statement that having a healthy diet will improve an athletes performance but it probably wouldn’t show up in the top three ways to improve an athletes performance. Other things like exercise, good coaching, and practice might be the best ways to improve performance but they are not the only ways.

But the ArtsWave research also uncovered the fact that if you ask people what would improve their neighborhood the most, the arts come up time and time again. Why? Because artists’ residences are known to herald an improvement in real-estate values; because arts audiences mean feet on the street and therefore greater public safety; and because arts venues are known to spawn coffee shops, restaurants, and other places of urban liveliness.

Therefore, the argument for public funding needs to be focused not on the art but on the public benefits of art-making.

I think this is an important insight. When approaching donors, the focus needs to be on persuasiveness, not just what is true. Organizations need to think about how to sell their impact to donors. This is true for all organizations, not just arts organizations. Think about the effect you have on your community and how that benefits various stakeholders, then approach them and ask them to pay for that benefit. It is a subtle correction to the fundamental distortion found in the social sector.

Measure Outcomes, Not Activities

December 13, 2011 • Blog, Measurement & Evaluation, Thoughts • by
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If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time, you know my love of data. I think that, while data should not have the last word on anything, it should have the first word on almost everything. It can bring clarity to an organization and challenge it to become better. Organizations around the world are jumping on the data train but sometimes they’re measuring the wrong thing.

The thing I see is organizations typically measure activities, not outcomes. That makes sense because activities are much easier to measure. Its easy to count how many people you served food too, how many people accessed your services, or how many volunteer hours you had this month compared to the previous month. This is good data to have but it does not answer the important question of the impact of your organization.

This activity oriented data doesn’t tell you how good the services that you provide are. They don’t tell you if people are better off after engaging in your services or not. You might be seeing increases in the number of people who access your services every year but that doesn’t mean that you are providing good services.

We need to address this question specifically in the social sector because it is fundamentally not a competitive market. The people paying for the services are not the ones consuming the services. So those that pay for and provide the services have to make sure that what they are offering is high quality.

If your organization is interested in engaging the question of impact, Contact Me.

Living in the Tension

December 6, 2011 • Blog, Thoughts • by
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I have a friend, Andrew Marin, who runs an organization called The Marin Foundation. His mission is to ”build bridges between the LGBT community and the Church through scientific research, biblical and social education, and diverse community gatherings.” Everyday he gets love and hate mail. People an all sides of the lightning rod issue of sexuality love him, and people on all sides of the issue hate him. He wakes up every morning and lives in the tension that exists around our sexuality.

Tension is something we often seek to avoid. We don’t like it. We pay massage therapists to rub it out of our bodies and talk therapists to get it out of our heads. We run from tension.

But I think some of the most amazing people in history don’t run from tension but towards it. Martin Luther King Jr. Ghandi. William Wilberforce. Steve Jobs. All these people moved towards tension, they lived between the here and now and the what could be.

Tension is only bad when it doesn’t lead to action. Tension is only bad when we let it stay inside of us and don’t create something from that tension.

What tension are you currently living in? Is it leading to creation or festering inside of you?

The Psychology & Economics of Community Development: How Impending Death Affects Adolescents

November 18, 2011 • Blog, Public Policy, Thoughts • by
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A couple of nights ago, my wife and I were having dinner with some friends when the topic of conversation turned to social problems in lower income communities. My wife is a therapist who has worked with low-income individuals and families, and the couple we were having dinner with both work in those kinds of communities as well and so we were all very passionate about the subject.

During the course of conversation my wife brought up the fact that many of the clients she worked with had a sense of foreshortened future, i.e. that they would not live very long. She said that a lot of the adolescents she worked with anticipated dying by age 25. This idea, while surprising, was confirmed by our two dinner guests.

I think this has massive policy implications. We all make decisions about investments based upon their return, with some investments having short-term returns while others mature over a longer period of time. People with a sense of foreshortened future won’t ever make long-term investments. If you don’t expect to live past 25, why make an investment that wouldn’t benefit you until you were in your 30s? It would be completely irrational to do that.

So long-term investments, like education, are irrational. Why would you spend all that time and money going to school when you wouldn’t live to reap the benefits.

Other cost-benefit analyses would be altered by short-term horizons as well. You will be more likely to engage in riskier behaviors because the immediate benefit of the risky behavior is more likely to outweigh the costs, if the costs would be aggregated over a long time horizon. Why not commit a crime that could benefit you today when you don’t expect to live long enough to pay the consequences?

We cannot expect people to make long-term investments until they no longer have a sense of foreshortened future. Offering a person hope is just as important as offering them an education, because until they have the hope, they will never invest in the education. I think this shows that in community development, changing the psychology of the community is just as important as changing its economics. The two are intricately connected.

A Necessary Idea

November 9, 2011 • Blog, Ideas, Thoughts • by
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Yesterday I wrote about The Power of an Idea, today I’d like to discuss the necessity of ideas. I feel like in this generation, ideas are so prevalent that they are devaluing themselves. It is so easy to share ideas that we don’t think about them before we share them. They’re becoming cheap and simplistic and lacking deep thought.

I also think that our environment isn’t conducive to valuing ideas. Our political context is becoming increasingly polarized and divisive, to the point where obvious solutions are cast aside because of political impossibilities. In many arenas people don’t care about the validity of the idea, only whether it aligns with their predetermined ideology.

In the Salons of 18th century France, people gathered with the sole purpose of sharing ideas for amusement, the refinement of taste, and the increase of knowledge through conversation. Can you imagine, in today’s society, sitting down with a diverse group and having a legitimate conversation? A conversation where people put aside their preconceived notions and engaged each other on the validity of the ideas being discussed? Where people entered with humility, believing they might actually learn something that could change their opinion?

We need ideas now as much as ever. The problems our society face are vast and difficult but we can overcome them if we engage in conversation. If we share ideas. If we share good ideas. Ideas we’ve thought deeply about yet hold loosely so that they can evolve to become even better. We don’t need cheap ideas, simple ideas, or notions. We need good ideas. We need beautiful ideas.

Perfection vs Excellence

October 27, 2011 • Blog, Thoughts • by
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Should we seek perfection or excellence?

I actually believe that perfection leads to complacency because there is no room for progress or innovation.

Excellence never rests, it always allows room for progress, practice, and innovation.

Seek to be excellent, not perfect.

What is a Social Business?

October 25, 2011 • Beliefs, Blog, Thoughts • by
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Social entrepreneurship. Social business. Mission driven organization. L3C. There are millions of terms floating around trying to get at this idea of a business that creates positive social outcomes.

But, in some sense, is there a business that creates no positive social outcomes?

All businesses generally have employees, therefore combatting unemployment and raising standards of living. All businesses sell products or services that people want, increasing the satisfaction of the consumer (most of the time). One could argue that no organization has done more to increase access to affordable healthcare than Walmart.

I think business, by its very existence, creates positive social outcomes.

So what’s all this talk about social businesses about?

I think it stems from a desire to care about something more than quarterly profits. I think it comes from the hunger to go out and solve problems with business. I think it comes from a frustration that the nonprofit sector cares more about survival than actually addressing issues.

I think that, just as people care about things other than wealth, businesses are realizing that they can as well.

Management vs Leadership

October 22, 2011 • Blog, bloggers, Leadership, Thoughts • by
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Seth Godin had a great post this morning on the difference between leadership and management.

“Managers work to get their employees to do what they did yesterday, but a little faster and a little cheaper.

Leaders, on the other hand, know where they’d like to go, but understand that they can’t get there without their tribe, without giving those they lead the tools to make something happen.

Managers want authority. Leaders take responsibility.”

I definitely think that people confuse the two and I think they are two distinct roles and often require two very different kinds of people. Managers tend to see incremental change where as leaders dream of innovation.

In the nonprofit sector I think we have an over-abundance of managers. Many executive directors are trying to incrementally change there programming year over year, when, to really solve problems, we need drastic innovation.

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